Comments on: Why the iPad’s user agent string presents a problem

By: John Romain

John Romain — Tue, 25 May 2010 23:04:56 +0000

Is it possible to update the user agent string on an iPad to emulate another browser such as IE?

By: Hamranhansenhansen

Hamranhansenhansen — Sun, 23 May 2010 08:59:42 +0000

No, the problem is websites detecting user agent strings at all.

You should be building just 1 website for all devices, detecting things like viewport size with CSS media queries when necessary. If you want to show an interface that’s optimized for 480×320, show that to all devices with that size viewport, not to all devices that have “mobile” in their user agent string. That is based on the assumption that of them have tiny handheld screens, which is not true. The iPad is merely exposing the problem with your assumption.

By: The web on tablets: How the iPad has immediately changed web development « Jeff dePascale

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:24:45 +0000

[...] still cased for in mobile development. iPad will likely surpass that number quickly. Currently, the iPad user agent string represents itself as a mobile device. Subsequently, many sites are presenting mobile variants by [...]

By: Jeff dePascale

Jeff dePascale — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:01:00 +0000

@manny – Good tip. Readers, also note that the Safari UA string can be spoofed using the developer menu (enable in prefs on mac or pc versions). entries can be added for iPad until Safari is updated to include them by modifying the UserAgemts.plist file for Safari. Additionally, User Agent Switcher for Firefox can spoof any UA string as well.

Note that in both cases this does not emulate legitimate rendering of pages on the iPad and will render the page exactly the same as it would without spoofing (case in point, Flash will still work). Rather, it lets you see how websites treat the use case of the specified UA string. You’ll find that many sites will still show mobile variants for the iPad UA string as of now (mostly due to Apple including ‘mobile’ within the UA string). We’ll see if future iterations of the iPad UA string present the device differently.

By: Jeff dePascale

Jeff dePascale — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:55:43 +0000

@Andrew thanks for the note – I have updated the post to reflect the release version UA string. Interestingly, my iPad UA string differs from yours slightly (32GB WiFi):

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10

How did you verify your UA string and what model are you on? I’m curious where the minor discrepancy arose.

By: manny

manny — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:36:50 +0000

Run this line in command prompt, this will change the chrome browser user agent to ipad

chrome -user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10″

By: Andrew Farmer

Andrew Farmer — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 03:54:15 +0000

You guys may not have had the benefit of the latest version of the Simulator, or the actual device. The iPad user agent does not say ‘iPhone’ in it at all. Here it is:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7B360

By: iPad User Agent « The HTML Pad

iPad User Agent « The HTML Pad — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:45:51 +0000

[...] Update: The User-Agent may in fact be “Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10″. This is according to commenter “Andrew” at Jeff dePascale’s blog. [...]

By: True size Blog » True size on iPad

True size Blog » True size on iPad — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:20:30 +0000

[...] iPad’s user agent string reveals the OS and browser it’s running, indicating it will be running Safari 4.0.4. In [...]

By: iBooks: Give Us The Tools | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com

iBooks: Give Us The Tools | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:08:21 +0000

[...] The User Agent from iPad’s Safari also needs to be known so that so that web developers can make programmatic changes to our web sites to give iPad users an optimized website experience. We need a Safari simulator for iPad and we need it really soon. I can’t emphasize this enough. [...]